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Of Beards and Men: The Revealing History of Facial Hair. By Christopher Oldstone-Moore. (University of Chicago Press: Chicago. 338 pages. Cloth $32.00. Paper $19.00.)

At the end of his introduction to Of Beards and Men, Oldstone-Moore sets boundaries for his study He writes: “Limitation of space and sources dictate that this initial exploration of beard history focus primarily on the elite men in Western Europe and North America who had time and resources to shape their bodies as they deemed appropriate, and whose choices dictated social norms.” (4)

Historians are allowed to lay out the boundaries of their topics, and it is legitimate to limit narratives where no sources can be found. But I have to take issue with the focus on elite men. Once into the 1960s and 1970s, at the very least, there had to be sources for all social strata on the politics of facial hair. It seems to me a gross oversight to leave out the politics of Black facial hair simply because they do not fit Oldstone-Moore’s definition of elites, which he views as white Europeans and those of European descent. He never explicitly defines what he means by the “West,” though North America does seem a bit more specific if not inclusive all those social and racial groups present in North America. For Oldstone-Moore, the politics of facial hair means white facial hair.

Surely there were elite Black men both within and without of their communities in the West, such as Martin Luther King, who wore facial hair. Why are he and other black “elites” like him excluded from this narrative? Why is there nothing about social movements like the Civil Rights Movement and the Black Panthers? Black hair has always been implicitly and explicitly political, and I don’t understand why they are excluded. They have been a part of the western hemisphere since the 15th century, especially in North America. Their African roots do not preclude them from a place in a book about the politics of facial hair in the West.

I think Oldstone-Moore writes himself into a corner by only focusing on elites. He never offers a definition of what an “elite” is, and the argument that other social classes may not appear in the narrative seems limited to me. The omission of Black people and other minorities limits his work. Had he gone into more details about the nature of his sources, exclusion of minority groups in the West might make more sense. As is the vague definitions and boundaries leads to a work that seems to undermine his own purpose. We will have to wait for other authors to examine what Oldstone-Moore has left out.

American Inheritance: Liberty and Slavery in the Birth of a Nation. By Edward  J. Larson. (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2023. pp. 358. Cloth, $32.50.)

In American Inheritance: Liberty and Slavery in the Birth of a Nation, Edward J. Larson sets out to chart the simultaneous trajectories of the quest for liberty and the institution of slavery at the birth of the United States. This is not a new topic, and there isn’t really much that is presented here that is new. The book skews heavily toward political and legal sources, also not a new tactic. Enslaved characters are seen through white eyes. Maybe that is the fault of a paucity of sources, but it leads room for further research or perhaps points back at reading other work already done.

Larson focuses on politicians and generals, great white men who made decisions shaped thousands, millions, of enslaved’s lives, and continue to shape race relations in America to this day. There is nothing here that really gives the enslaved a voice, despite frequently inserted anecdotes about slaves like Phillis Wheatley and Ona Judge, and free Blacks like Benjamin Banneker. The majority of the text feels like Black voices are lost in Larson’s narrative. Their stories are told through the eyes of their enslavers. Whites and their contentious battle over the fate of slavery is what is on view here.

The strength of American Inheritance is that it collates a body of scholarship on the conflicting values of liberty and slavery between late colonialism and into the early republic in a way that may be digestible to a reader newly interested in the topic, or one looking for a broad overview. Larson’s arguments are cogent without getting too bogged down in specific details, a good read for someone with a more casual interest. But, as noted above, this general overview loses some of the oomph of more academically-minded, or at least more detailed, historical scholarship.

This is a very nuanced topic that still raises debates and drives violence and inequality to this day. At the time, Larson notes, such arguments over liberty and slavery drove colonial America to rebel against the British, comparing their status as unfairly taxed British colonists to enslaved Blacks. These beliefs revealed how deep personal debates over liberty and slavery were:

Patriot invocations of slavery were often not philosophical arguments based on abstract notions of freeman in a state of nature. They were intensely emotional appeals that relied for their force on a familiarity with chattel slavery and an equation of Blacks with such bondage. (51)

Then, as now, racial identities have been used to construct and galvanize ideologies surrounding liberty and oppression. By failing to adequately address the cognitive dissonance of the co-existing ideals of liberty and slavery, founding Americans refused to remove a splinter that would grow to an egregious wound as evidenced by the Civil War, a wound barely half-healed that still festers to this day. For early Americans, a strong federalist government trumped ending slavery; economic interests colored by ideological racism and distorted ideas of who was enslaved and who was not perpetuated the institution of slavery until the issue became one that Americans could no longer compromise away. The Civil War may have ended slavery, but the failure of Reconstruction and the violent backlash against the modern Black rights movements abetted by a former president (and presidential candidate) eager to manipulate racial tensions for votes has left us with a battle surrounding liberty and race to this day.

As mentioned, American Inheritance is a good synthesis of scholarship on the inextricable issues of liberty and slavery that persist into the twenty-first century. Anyone wanting to understand that backdrop of our current passionate debates involving race would use this as a good starting point, but I would encourage readers to look more deeply into the scholarship to get more specific investigation of these twinned subjects, and to perhaps find the Black voices that are missing here.

Out of the Depths: A History of Shipwrecks. By Alan G. Jamieson. (London, Reaktion Books Ltd, 2022. pp. 342. Cloth $42.00.)

When I first picked this book off the shelf I was skeptical. In my mind I was expecting a historical analysis of the meaning and importance of shipwrecks. What I saw looked like just a list of shipwrecks for 300 pages. And in a way that was what this book was, but it is written so briskly that it really pulls you into the story. There is also a lot of tension between who gets to own and capitalize on shipwrecks. Is it the nations the boats originally came from? Is it the archaeologists who want to study and historicize the wrecks? Is it the treasure hunters who use modern technology to discover and plunder wrecks that have left behind millions of dollars worth of precious metals and artifacts?  Who shares the ownership and also, though a bit less explored, who shares the blame?

I ended up really enjoying this book. It is a neat history of shipwrecks in the West. It would have benefitted more from additional examinations of shipwreck cultures from places other than the West. Though there is a section on China and some written about Japan, almost all of those doing the discovering, salvaging, and sinking, are westerners. Is there a way to write a more global history of shipwrecks, or is this really just a preserve of the West? Somehow I don’t believe that. An examination of other cultures and their relationships to shipwrecks would bring more “depth” to this pleasantly breezy read.

We Shall Be No More: Suicide and Self-Government in the Newly United States. By Richard Bell. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012. Cloth $49.00.)

We Shall Be No More chronicles who had the right to control the narrative of death and even the event of death itself in the early republic and antebellum America. The newly minted United States viewed suicide to be a symptom of the nation’s loss of control over its citizens, as the state and religion sought to maintain a monopoly on violence. Some of these arguments and tactics of moral suasion remain with us today in the form of debates over the death penalty (also discussed by Bell – suicides of convicted criminals robbed the state of the power to prosecute and control violence) or the fear that mass media was corrupting youth and glorifying suicide. Bell covers a large range of groups interested in preventing suicide, writing:

Whether the setting is the jail or the plantation, the salon or the sitting room, the revival meetings or the asylum, the true subject here is power: the power of parents over children, of masters over slaves, of the state over inmates, of ministers over their followers, of authors over readers, and even medical science over God. (41)

This is a narrative told from the point of view of those groups wanting to stop suicide and how they viewed the sin or reprobation of those who committed it. And those who reported on suicide walked a fine line between neutral reporting and sensationalism. Parents, religious leaders, politicians, abolitionists, and others all used suicide in various ways to try to manipulate their own agendas. It all came down to who could control and dictate the narrative of suicide.

For a book on such a sensitive topic, Bell avoids sensationalism to provide a matter of fact narrative about the role of suicide in the early republic and antebellum periods. Suicide served as a counterpoint to various groups’ claims of mastery over their followers and had to be manipulated to demonstrate strengths of some of these groups. As in the case of the battle between the Universalists and evangelicals over whose religion provoked more damning instances of suicide, suicide could be used as a weapon to denigrate those competing for power.

This was an interesting book, and it seems to me to provide an enriching supplement to works seeking to explore the uncertainty of the political experiment that was democracy in America. As I have mentioned before, who got to control the narrative? Suicide in this book can be seen as a way to reject that narrative and rewrite it in an independent form. It was subversive, whether intended to be that way or not. Bell makes a good case for this argument, though sometimes he strays into simple history and forgets to pull the string of suicide in until the last minute. There is a balance to be made here between contextualizing his subject and actually analyzing it and creating and argument.

The chapter on abolition was especially striking, and it made me question what we could learn about suicides if slave voices had been left in the record. This book focuses on who tried to control suicide, not those who attempted it (and succeeded), and again, this might be a lack of available sources. But I think if those sources could be found (and indeed, Bell does give examples of suicide notes) we would have a more well-rounded picture of those who chose to take their lives. It all comes down to a basic question: who had agency here? Bell sees this as a battle between those who constructed the dominant narrative and the suicides that disrupted or undermined it. Perhaps the answer is a sequel that moves forward in time, that examines how suicide played a role in postbellum America. Either way, this book adds an important examination of the role of suicide to the history of the first 50 years of American history, providing evidence of yet another contentious issue that the state struggled to control as it constructed a new nation.

Pathogenesis: A History of the World in Eight Plagues. By Jonathan Kennedy. (Crown: New York, 2023. Cloth, $30.00.)

Cataclysms: An Environmental History of Humanity. By Laurent Testot. Trans. Katherine Throssell. (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2020 (French edition published in 2017). Cloth, $35.00.)

Both of these books, chronicling the challenges faced by Homo sapiens in the form of environmental factors, some created by man and others the product of concurrent evolution, start during the Paleolithic era and pay special attention to how Homo sapiens fueled or adapted to these threats over time. Both provide a picture of “cataclysms” coevolving with man over time, whether it be through the lifecycle of disease or the demonstratable and drastic changes our pursuit of a middle class lifestyle dependent on the use of energy sources that are driving a disastrous form of climate change.

As in the book Mosquito: A History of our Deadliest Predator, the burden of proof lies on the authors. Were changes in the earth and the Homo sapiens species correlative, causative, or both? Whereas Testot’s goal is to track how human beings were affected by the environment, and perhaps more importantly, how they affected it, Kennedy is attempting to chart how disease was determinative in the course of human evolution, traced over a time period from the paleolithic to the present day. He jumps into the fray of authors attempting to the determine why Homo sapiens, out of all the genus of Homos, came to be the only member of the genus left, even though several other Homos co-existed with Homo sapiens, even interbreeding with them, as was the case with Neanderthals. Kennedy’s answer to this perpetual puzzle is that disease wiped out Homo sapiens competitors. As to why Homo sapiens did not immediately move north and why Neanderthals did not move south, Kennedy explains:

…infectious diseases created an invisible barrier: it was impossible for Homo sapiens to migrate out of Africa because sooner or later they would encounter Neanderthals and their pathogens and get ill, and the same was true when Neanderthals pushed southward. (30)

The solution to the problem that eventually allowed Homo sapiens to colonize Europe? Interbreeding with Neanderthals, who passed genetic disease immunity to the resulting children, who, according to Kennedy, then spread the immunity quickly among other Homo sapiens. Unfortunately, this did not seem to be a reciprocal transaction, and other Homos like Neanderthals died out as a result of diseases Homo sapiens had developed immunity to. Kennedy claims we can see this advantage in DNA samples taken from the different groups.

Kennedy is at his strongest when he is discussing disease from the Black Plague on. Here we have increasingly definitive research demonstrating how disease effected societies. I’d like to say this a worldwide history, but like other work I’ve read that attempt to trace patterns through long duree of history, this work is almost exclusively Eurocentric, including the inevitable examination of the decimation of the Americas by European diseases. I am waiting for a history of the Black Death in China or the rest of Asia. Did it happen in Africa? If the sources don’t exist, why not say so?

Testot takes a similar immense scope of Homo history, but he believes environment and Homo sapiens‘ ability to manipulate it to be the determining factor in human evolution:

What makes us unique in the living world is momentum; the ability to bring about continual change is specific to humans. Human culture is constantly evolving under the combined pressure of societal choices and environmental transformations. And this culture has, in turn, long modified its environment, creating continual feedback between culture and nature, of which our bodies are the product. Humans escaped natural determinism that day we were able to use culture to make a lasting impact on our surroundings…We just have to work out when this might have taken place. (9)

Testot’s examination is interesting because of his long duree focus on the interaction between humans and their environment. As mentioned above, he examines the turning points when humans effected or responded to their environments in a way that brought about sustained change. His argument that the environment affected human evolution was a bit Lamarckian for me – he does not produce the same DNA evidence that Kennedy leverages in Pathogenesis. I understand that certain traits were selected for, but does Testot’s thesis depend upon intentionality or simply the survival of genes better adapted to meet environmental challenges? How much is genetics and how much is culture?

Ultimately, Testot baldly asserts that humans have taken our control over the environment to a dangerous extreme that is leading the environment to change in ways that may destroy all human life, maybe even all life. Evolution can not adapt fast enough to save the planet, and humans are not acting quickly enough on a human timescale to curb the changes we have made to the environment in order to bring environmental conditions to a place where we reach a sustenance level. Humans have also created a completely lopsided demographic that has driven these negative changes.

I read these books in sequence, unaware that they would be tackling similar themes and timescales in different ways. I think both authors have important points to make, but their books reveal and strengths and weaknesses of taking on human history from start to finish. Testot should be applauded for his focus on how cataclysms effected the globe (excepting Africa for the most part) – this is a first book I have read in this genre that does so. Kennedy deftly shows how Europeans adapted to various plagues they encountered in history. The question both books leave open is: as we now have the ability and power to alter the environment, how do we do so in a way that is healthy and sustainable for a global population? Testot clumsily interjects:

Species become invasive when they prosper in area where they have no natural predators. And humans have no predators at all, particularly now that we have overcome epidemics. (49)

Oops. Maybe we can forgive this, as the originally French version of this book was published in 2017. But the brief note on the English edition in 2020, Testot makes no mention of COVID-19. AIDS rates one page. For Testot, plagues are an artifact of the past, whereas for Kennedy they are not only a present danger, but also lurking in the future. They seem to reach the same conclusion though: mankind has got to do something about it, not just to a create a healthy and hospitable world, but to create equity. Both these works chronicle the struggle between nature and man, what perhaps makes us different from all other animals. It’s up to us to determine how this future will turn out.

Bodies in Blue: Disability in the Civil War North. By Sarah Handley-Cousins. (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2021. pp. 186. Cloth, $35.99. Paper, $29.95.)

Amputations may be the most well-known disabilities suffered by Civil War veterans, and because of this, Handley-Cousins chooses to focus on other war-caused disabilities to examine the way disability and manhood interacted during and after the Civil War in the North. Disabilities that soldiers and health officials could not prove occurred unequivocally as a result of the war that obviously continued to impair soldiers ability to support themselves and their dependents after the war often went unsupported. She explains:

Rather, as the impairment most closely associated with the war, amputation did not generally raise the same questions about legitimacy and worthiness as less straightforward ailments. We will instead explore the ways in which soldiers, civilians, and institutions grappled with disorders that did not easily fit into existing cultural narratives of manhood and sacrifice. Centering our attention on such bodies reveals a very different story about Civil War wounds, one where disabled soldiers were just as likely to be used, rejected, separated, and distrusted as they were to be honored. (3)

As stated, the definition of disability was deeply imbricated with the definition of masculinity. According to this definition, a true man was independent and could work and support his family on his own. To qualify for a pension, the disabled needed to prove that they were incapable of working, which then put them in direct conflict with the definition of what it meant to be a man. Soldiers who had suffered obvious wounds, most likely amputation, often had less trouble receiving pensions and were less likely to be perceived as lacking in manhood. For men like Col. Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, a disability did not necessary mean complete debilitation. By force of will, Chamberlain continued to work following his discharge, but was consistently plagued by a severe and chronic wound that somehow had not managed to kill him. But Handley-Cousins calls it an invisible illness – it was literally hidden by his clothes – so pension granters did not award him the same legitimacy he might have earned had his wound been more visible. Also, Chamberlain’s refusal to let his disability prevent him from carrying out masculine duties worked against him when applying for a pension increase.

The most frustrating of Handley-Cousins’s chapters was the one on mental illness. Handley-Cousins begins the chapter by stating that she will not be using modern diagnoses to diagnose the soldiers interned in mental institutions, which is fair, but she swings to far to the other side in not reporting contemporary diagnoses made by the doctors in the institutions or exploring how doctor’s in the postbellum North defined mental illness. The chapter is frustratingly short. If the federal government was so unwilling to issue pensions to soldiers with invisible disabilities, who was paying to support the mentally ill in these asylums, and who determined when these invisible illness was enough to necessitate admission and continuing treatment? How were veterans treated? What could be her most convincing chapter belies a thorough examination of her subject.

This book is often frustratingly brief. Kudos for briefly comparing the Northern response to disabilities to the Southern one. An entire book could probably be written about that. But not enough here is expounded upon. Black soldiers warrant some mention, but it is not even clear to me if they were eligible for pensions, let alone the struggles they might have faced in attempting to receive them; if this process was different for Blacks and whites. Blacks appear ever so briefly as subjects of medical experiments, but I feel that the number of Blacks experimented on and desecrated in death probably compared significantly to whites and could be explored more here. And how did the war effect the mental illness of Blacks? Did they go to institutions too? Unfortunately, Blacks largely disappear from the narrative after Handley-Cousins finished her chapter on medical experimentation and display. The role of disabilities in the lives of Northern Civil War Blacks deserves much more attention.

A brief read that makes an important argument. I only wish Handley-Cousins had expounded more on her arguments and presented more evidence to support them. This book reads as an introduction to a much vaster and richer topic.

Wonder Woman: Omnibus. By George Perez. (DC Comics, 2022. pp. 640. Cloth, $100.00.)

I love Wonder Woman, and I came to her the way I’m sure a lot of her fans did: through Patty Jenkins’s 2017 film Wonder Woman starring Gal Gadot. I think it is one of the best superhero movies ever, and it is definitely one of the better feminist films ever. Wonder Woman was an agent in her own story. Plus the hair and sword. Ever since She-ra, I have been a sucker for women with good hair and a sword. But beyond that, Gal Gadot’s Wonder Woman managed to blend what are thought of as traditionally masculine and feminine traits. Blazingly independent when fighting for what she believes to be right, capable of standing on her own and possessing belief in herself and her own abilities, she still values teamwork and desires to bring out the best in every person around her. I think the movie’s self-aware charm can be best summed up in Etta Candy’s quip, “Specs? And suddenly she’s not the most beautiful woman you’ve ever seen?”

Anyway, after falling in love with that movie, I began to investigate Wonder Woman’s history. I wanted to understand where she came from, and that meant turning to the comic books. I have a tortured relationship with comics and graphic novels. I am a very textual person, so I often struggle to stop and actually look at the images and visual presentations put forth in comics and graphic novels. So I have to really pace myself and slow down. And I will admit, I did not read any of the older comics, as in, nothing before the 1980s. And to my disappointment, I didn’t like nearly any of these depictions of Wonder Woman. Too much action, not enough story and character development. This especially true of the most recent comics, though I haven’t started the 2023 reboot, so that could be different. But I left the comics feeling disappointed. How could such a great movie have come out of such weak source material?

Then I began to read George Perez’s 1980s Wonder Woman. I bought the first, big omnibus and finally sat down with it after struggling through all the other Women Woman comics I read. And I finally found the comic I was looking for. Enough action to be a superhero comic, but enough character development to be a graphic novel. Wonder Woman’s existence does not revolve around Steve Trevor, whose love interest in this incarnation is Etta Candy. She fights female villains just as strong and capable as she is. And she has the best sidekicks, Professor Julia Kapatelis and her teenaged daughter Vanessa. There is a trove of strong, interesting, multi-faceted, independent women. They drive change. And while Wonder Woman is as emo as ever, she is here allowed moments of happiness and triumph that don’t always focus on the physical battlefield. They are both a part of her.

Though I will complain that in the last comic included in the omnibus, Julia Kapatelis excuses a bad attitude as a symptom of menopause. Really, George? Really?

Is George Perez’s version of Wonder Woman perfect? No, that place is reserved for Adrianne Palicki’s 2011 take on Wonder Woman.* But it is my favorite version that I’ve encountered. I’m currently on the second omnibus, and unfortunately it has been disappointing so far. Too much action, too little character development. And it starts with a disjointed sequel to a Justice League comic not included in the omnibus that makes finding your bearings very difficult. If there’s another thing I don’t like about modern comics it’s all the crossovers.

But I digress. Am I a new Wonder Woman initiate? Certainly. Am I missing the point of most of the Wonder Woman comics I haven’t liked? Possibly. Will I keep exploring the character to see what I can find? Absolutely. Wonder Woman is the kick ass, independent, fearlessly feminine and masculine superhero I have always looked for (again, outside of She-ra). She is a superhero who ultimately battles to demonstrate how human she is without also losing her identity as a demigod from an island paradise ruled by a race of warrior women. She is complex, and she is always exploring that complexity head on, refusing to compromise her beliefs and who she is unless presented with alternative evidence. She is not averse to change for the better. And she always believes in the better. It’s what makes her Wonder Woman.

*Watch here. I highly recommend it. It may get yanked soon, so do it now!

Elderflora: A Modern History of Ancient Trees. By Jared Farmer. (New York: Basic Books, 2022. pp. 482. Cloth, $35.00.)

The history of elderflora, the name Jared Farmer gives to the longest lived trees on Earth, is the history not only of nature and the environment, but is also the history of human beings and their relationship to nature as individuals, as care-takers, and simply as co-evolving living beings. Elderflora is really Farmer’s investigation of how human-caused events are effecting elderflora through climate change. It is important to note that Farmer does take a global view of elderflora. While Farmer does take care to cite when certain trees are emblematic and intrinsic to Indigenous culture and identities, this is still a Eurocentric work. I think Farmer is following the scholarship and the history of the study of elderfora, which has been dominated by scientists in the West until very recently. But more work can be done on how native populations co-existed with and managed elderflora, and how they relate to them today. How do Indigenous Peoples view climate change?

One thing Farmer does bring to light is that the environment is always changing, it has been for billions of years, and can do so without human input on an everyday scale. That does not change, however, that human activities are now swiftly influencing the earth, introducing human-produced climate change. One thing Farmer seeks to understand is about how this climate change will effect the elderflora that have lived through thousands of years of change to serve as living testaments that can be compared to and measured against human history, in our own self-centered way. Humans and trees have been co-evolving for millennia.

I found one of Farmer’s most interesting chapters to be the one that chronicled how those who collected tree segments used a tree’s lifetime to measure the progress of human events. Samples taken from felled trees appeared in museums and private collections around the world and their custodians would display them with placards or strings aligned with certain rings that marked the occurrence of certain human events, for example, the fall of Rome. In this way human beings reinforced relationships to nature that measured the scale of its existence on a human timeline, putting forth that this nature only matters as it relates to events in human life. But these are imposed definitions. For Farmer, it is just as important that dendochronologists and other tree scientists use tree cores to track changes in the Earth’s environment over millennia. This can tell us how to understand evolution and the development of Earth’s environment, however, the focus always shifts back to humans, as the environmental history recorded by trees can help us understand our prospective future rocked by human-caused climate change.

Farmer relates a conversation he held with Doug Larson, “the scientist who documented Canada’s oldest trees, [and] started out as a lichenologist” (302). I found it extremely illuminating in terms of how scientists who study the deep past view nature and biology. The following exchange ensues:

I [Farmer] queried Larson: Are you moved by lichens? ‘Oh yeah,’ he replied immediately. ‘They’ve put up with far more [than trees]. You can have a nuclear war and they’ll do fine. Lichens and cockroaches –  perfect food chain! When environmentalists says humans are going to destroy the Earth, that’s arrogant. There’s nothing that’s going to destroy the Earth. We might destroy ourselves; we might influence the food chain.’ (302)

Nature changes with our without us. And humans have long been doing things to change the Earth, at the expense of some species over others. But so has nature. If climate change continues, Earth might not be destroyed, in Larson’s terminology, but it will most likely look very different, and it could very likely be without us to see what a new Earth looks like. For Larson, we are just blips on the timeline. For Farmer, the existence of elderflora proves that humans and nature are inextricably connected, and to steward the health of one is to steward the health of the other. Trees can teach us as much about ourselves as they can about themselves.

I am not sure this is the message Farmer wants me to walk away with. So much of his story is about human’s discovery of the past, and how that is shaping our understanding of the future and more, how we might be able to use that knowledge to positively effect the future, to steer us away from a looming disaster. I believe the climate change is real, and I believe we must to something to stop it or alleviate its symptoms, that we are responsible for rehabilitating the nature we have so debilitated over the centuries. But this provokes a laundry list of questions. Who or what is worth saving? Is there actually ideal balanced nature that we can return to, or do we have to make sacrifices to save the parts that we deem worth saving? What do we do about the massive imbalance of environmental degradation between the developed and developing worlds? What should the future look like? Scientists, historians, politicians, and their constituents, no matter race, gender, or class, must work together to answer these questions. For Farmer, studying elderflora may help answer these questions. If we study the natural world and the history and stories it can tell us, we will learn about our own nature. And that is worth saving.

Pushing Cool: Big Tobacco, Racial Marketing, and the Untold Story of the Menthol Cigarette. By Keith Wailoo. (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2021. pp. 396. Cloth, $30.00.)

“Why do Blacks like menthol so much? (5)”

In Pushing Cool, Keith Wailoo traces how cigarette companies created menthol cigarettes as a flavor marketed across race as a healthy alternative to supposedly harsher non-mentholated cigarettes, to ones championing black identity. Cigarette companies deliberately targeted blacks through urban marketing campaigns to racialize menthol cigarettes. Further, when anti-smoking activists such as health experts and government officials called cigarette companies out on their horrific racist practices, cigarette companies retaliated by saying that Blacks made a personal choice to smoke menthols and to ban them was insulting to Black’s intelligence as consumers, not to mention that it violated their right to freedom of choice.

One thing I didn’t know was how deeply imbricated cigarette companies were with Black culture. These ties extended beyond racialized advertising in Black urban enclaves and reached its tentacles into Black advocacy groups and politicians. For example, by funding the NAACP, cigarette companies gained a modicum of control over Black politics by winning them supporters among those they financially backed. I don’t want to deny Black agency here, however, this practice emphasized that Black communities remained divided over the role cigarettes and cigarette companies played in their lives. Did Blacks smoke menthols because they were manipulated by targeted advertising, or was smoking menthols simply a matter of personal preference?

Wailoo comes down heavily on the side of the argument that targeted advertising by cigarette companies led Blacks to smoke menthols and therefore created the public health crises that result from heavy smoking. Just as practices priming young consumers to smoke cigarettes, advertisers appealed to Black desires as observed by extensive market research, to create a Black population primed to smoke menthols. His extensive use of industry sources forced into the public sphere supports his thesis that calculating cigarette agencies deliberately targeted Black smokers through advertising and their support of Black causes, culture, and politicians.

This was a great book, but it left me desperately wanting a cigarette, even though I haven’t had one in years. That is how deep cigarettes dig their claws into you – even when you’re reading about how bad for you they are, you still want one.  To me, Wailoo taps into the insidious nature of cigarettes and other tobacco products. Savvy advertising in the face of a bevy of restrictions is still enough to overcome prejudices against smoking, especially in populations consistently targeted to become customers. Wailoo’s use of industry sources is damning, but the question does remain of the role of Black agency. The battle over menthols has in many ways revolved around this question. Pushing Cool is an excellent industrial/business history, and would do well in a class on the history of technology. Cigarettes are technologies, and this book traces menthol cigarette’s trajectory from being advertised as a racially-neutral, health-based cigarette, to a racialized phenomenon.

The Tame and Wild: People and Animals After 1492. By Mary Norton (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2024. pp. 438. Cloth, $37.95.)

There are lots of weaknesses in Brian Fagan’s The Intimate Bond: How Animals Shaped Human History (2014). This book is not about how all animals shaped all of human history – it focuses on domesticated animals, mostly in Europe and North Africa, with a detour into China in one of his many chapters on the horse. So undomesticated animals are excluded from this history, as are animals in the Western Hemisphere, where, yes, there were not as many domesticated animals. However, this not mean that animals in the Western Hemisphere, domestic or not, did not form intimate bonds with the Indigenous peoples of those continents. Fagan makes the mistake of saying:

Now, for the first time [since animals were domesticated], animals became individual property – something to be cherished, valued, and counted – to be given as calculated gifts, not necessarily as currency in the sense we would use the word today, but as part of the equation of survival and wealth accumulation that became central to human life in ways unimaginable among hunters and foragers (67).

This is where Mary Norton’s The Tame and the Wild comes in to undercut Fagan’s myopic vision of human-animal relationships by demonstrating that hunter-gatherer societies in the Americas did, in fact, have intimate bonds with the animals around them. They may not have domesticated them, but they did engage in a process that Norton calls familiarization: 

Familiarization differs from domestication in that familiarized animals were not bred in captivity – at least before encounters with Europeans – but rather animals found or captured in the wild…these pithy definitions underscore a bond between tamer and tamed, organized most fundamentally around the nurturing relationship of the feeder and the fed (131).

Further:

If predation is the process by which one pursues and consumes another being, familiarization – or feeding and therefore taming – is how one turns a wild being into kin (132).

To familiarize an animals was to tame it, to acclimate it to human interaction and mutual dependency. Indigenous Peoples of the Americas used familiarization to tame wild animals and incorporate them into society for a variety of uses, including acting as hunting partners, or as pets. As Norton explains, Indigenous Peoples would not prey among animals they fed, they would only consume wild animals that they had not familiarized. To Europeans used to raising livestock to a kill and eat, this refusal to eat the flesh of those they fed was foreign, strange, and, as defined by the European relationship between livestock and their owners, uncivilized.

Chapter by chapter, Norton refutes the argument that because the Americas did not have a proliferation of animals able to be domesticated, that Indigenous peoples only had relationships to animals that involve hunting and killing them. One of the most useful examples of this is the way Indigenous Peoples would tame parrots or monkeys, making gifts of them to Europeans. Indigenous Peoples also approached initial encounters with European animals as one of familiarization, and built relationships with animals like horses and pigs based on taming instead of domesticating. Virginia DeJohn Anderson has written extensively on the role of European domesticated animals in the colonization of North America in Creatures of Empire. The Tame and the Wild is the Central and South American corollary to Anderson’s work. 

Norton makes a powerful argument when introducing the idea of familiarization vs. domestication, and I want to include it here in its entirety, because it is what made this book really stand out for me:

The scattered and fragmentary nature of the sources touching on early modern taming practices is the primary reason why this study employs capacious geographical and temporal parameters. The lack of attention paid to the history of familiarization is also rooted in the fact that scholars – among them Jared Diamond – have misleadingly interpreted taming practices through the teleological lens of domestication. In other words, they have assumed taming wild animals was a “stepping stone” to “full” domestication. By aggregating fragmentary traces and avoiding a teleological view of domestication, the importance and complexity of familiarization as a mode of interaction can come into view (132).

In this argument, Norton reveals that we still view animal-human relationships through the lens of European colonists. The colonization argument claims that domestication of animals is not just concomitant with the rise of Western “civilization,” it is a prerequisite for it. The West’s contemporary scholars can write about Indigenous People’s relationships with the animals they hunted because this human-animal relationship was familiar to them, even though the way Indigenous people’s viewed and carried out hunting diverged sharply from how Europeans approached it. Other Indigenous relationships with animals have been erased from history because they simply do not conform with how Europeans/Westerners understand the “proper” relationship between humans and animals. Familiarization is not domestication, and this means that Indigenous People’s lose their identities to the tellers of the dominant narrative of human-animal relationships and therefore civilization.

Norton’s arguments and the evidence she presents are much more eloquent and informative than the summary I have given here. Her research refutes the Euro-centrism of Fagan’s writing, and even of Anderson’s, though it also fits nicely with Anderson in providing a counternarrative to Anderson’s focus. The two books can work together, even as Norton carves a new and important place for her scholarship. By uncovering the process of familiarization in the way Indigenous Peoples approached the animals around them, Norton gives us a new understanding of the history of how human and animals have interacted over time, the fact that these animals and humans in the Americas did have intimate bonds prior to European contact, even if these animals weren’t domesticated. European colonization ripped at these bonds and forced domesticated animals on the Indigenous Peoples, even if they still did find ways to incorporate animals into their own cultural understanding, much to the chagrin of their colonizers.

How people interacted with animals was important culturally, socially, and politically. It defined who was civilized and who was not, who fit in and who didn’t, who had and who lacked power. Norton’s work fills a historical vacuum, demonstrating how to research and write a history of a topic that has been aggressively forgotten, even to the current day.